Class sizes will increase and more than 1,000 teachers will be laid off if the Clark County School Board adopts its proposed budget tonight.

The School District must cut $60 million in spending. Officials had planned on saving that money by freezing teacher pay. But the Clark County Education Association, the teacher's union, fought that plan. An arbitrator ruled in the union's favor.

As a result, according to a memo sent out Wednesday, 1,015 teacher positions will be eliminated. This will result in classes increasing by about two or three students each.

Now, as Agenda co-host Elizabeth Crum noted today when I was a guest on her show, 1,015 layoffs doesn't mean that those 1,015 employees won't have a job in CCSD next year. Pink slips will be given to 1,015 CCSD workers, but after teachers retire or leave, some or all of those teachers will be hired back, although there will be 1,015 fewer positions next year.

This led to a couple of unintentional hilarious tweets from the Nevada State Education Association, including this one.

This is funny, because emphasizing the number of layoffs and ignoring vacancies and unfilled positions mitigating those layoffs is exactly what union bosses do during legislative sessions to ratchet up pressure for increasing education funding.

Also, NSEA has just said or at least implied that reducing 1,015 positions is a scare tactic, even though eliminating 1,015 positions means larger class sizes! The implication being that NSEA thinks there's no reason to be scared of larger class sizes.

And on this, NSEA would be right - even though I don't think that's what the NSEA union bosses intended - because eliminating CCSD's 1,015 worst teachers would be a boon to student achievement.

Why?

Because a teacher is the most important school-controlled factor in student achievement. Students with an excellent teacher learn 18 months of material in one year; students with an ineffective teacher learn 6 months of material in one year. Some people want "smaller classes," but the most important school-controlled factor in student learning is teacher quality, not class size.

Victor Joecks is executive vice president at the Nevada Policy Research Institute and oversees the execution of NPRI's strategic plan and policy initiatives. These efforts have included NPRI successfully informing voters about the destructive impact of tax increase ballot measure, creating TransparentCalifornia.com, which has received over 40 million page views and running campaigns that have decreased union members by thousands, including expanding that effort into a national coalition of over 100 organizations.